Few HR professionals would want to carry out their day-to-day tasks without a decent HRIS system, but how can you move from basic functions to getting maximum return on your technology investment? Angus Kidman looks at how to reap the most benefits from a HRIS

Every vendor you ever meet will tell you how much time and money your organization will save by implementing self service tools and workflow automation.  It’s definitely true that the initiative to go paperless has shifted work, but whether or not it has reduced work is another question completely.  I’d like to theorize that overall, HR doesn’t actually have any less work, nor do managers or employees.  However, they may overall be happier bout the work than in paper environments they had before.

Let’s start with HR.  Before, we had huge organizations sitting around just to process and data enter address changes, annual performance reviews, and merit increases.  The hope is that all of this work has gone away, but the reality is that this work has created a data maintenance nightmare for HRIS.  However, there probably is an overall reduction in the number of employee hours spent doing some of these tasks, and I think the overall trend for HR has probably been positive.  Don’t discount however, that the work of a few HRIS people is work a great deal more than the work of a dozen data entry people.  Dollar for dollar, I’m not sure we won this battle.

Moving on to managers, we can take the exact same scenarios of performance reviews and merit increases.  The fact that these are no longer paper based, and that these data points for all employees can be found in a single place has been great for management.  Again, the honest truth is that the work has not been reduced, it has just been removed from a paper process to an on-line process.  The quality of the implementation will determine if the manager is